Email, instant messaging, text messaging, as well as other communications systems that exist today have converged to leave consumers of the technologies with less control of when and how they are interrupted. Interruptions by way of mail, instant messaging, text messaging, telephone, calendar invites, e-meetings, voice mail, organizational web conferences, cellular, and so on, are hugely time consuming and are oftentimes a nuisance for those who wish to concentrate on a task, or manage their day in relation to tasks they want to get done. Likewise, managers of teams are oftentimes frustrated with outside interruptions distracting members of their team and wish to manage this.
In an attempt to manage interruptions, a person may choose to ignore various communications attempts. Unfortunately, while ignoring the communication attempt may to at least some degree mitigate the interruption, the alerts provided by the communications systems may still result in an interruption. Various communications systems include mechanisms for controlling interruptions, such as do-not-disturb for voice communications and instant messaging. Similarly, email notification systems can be turned off, and so on. However, each of the interruption control mechanisms must be individually set, and later disabled. The number of steps necessary to control interruptions from the various communications systems can be a nuisance in and of itself. Furthermore, because an individual interruption control mechanisms must be disabled for each communication system, there may be a strong likelihood that a user will forget to disable one or more of the interruption control mechanisms, resulting in missed, or delayed communications.